
fhssT) A&?a 
Book C&C* 



The Story of 
Cambridgeshire 

By 

W. CUNNINGHAM 
f 

CAMBRIDGE : 1920 



/ 






THE 
STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 

LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.C. 4 




NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 

BOMBAY i 

CALCUTTA J- MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 

MADRAS J 

TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN CO. 

OF CANADA, Ltd. 
TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



THE STORY OF 
CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

AS TOLD BY ITSELF 

BEING SIX LECTURES 
GIVEN TO TEACHERS 



BY 

W. CUNNINGHAM, D.D., F.B.A. 



CAMBRIDGE 

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1920 






Printed in Gxeat Britain ev 

Richard Clav & Sons, Limited. 

brunswick st., stamford st., s.e. /, 

and bungay. suffolk. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I Prehistoric Times — The Fens . . i 

II The Immigrants ii 

III Self-Centred Groups — Markets . 21 

IV Fairs and Distant Trade . . 30 
V Royal Control .... 43 

VI Footprints 55 



THE STORY OF 

CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

i 

PREHISTORIC TIMES— THE FENS 

When Mr. Austin Keen was kind enough to invite 
me to give this course of lectures, I felt some hesita- 
tion about complying. For, as I know little of school 
work, and the difficulties you have to face, I was very 
doubtful whether I could say anything that would be 
a practical help to you. It occurred to me, however, 
that the work of all teachers is so far similar that, if 
I simply tried to draw on my own experience, you 
might perhaps find something for yourselves that 
seemed likely to be of service. 

The chief difficulty I have found in teaching in the 
University has been to awaken the interest of my 
class. If they are interested, they will be very atten- 
tive, and be ready to take in what is said ; and if they 
are not interested, the whole work drags and becomes 
wearisome alike to teacher and taught. And it 
was my experience that very few people are much 
interested in the history of the past : they live 

B I 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

in the present, and are inclined to let bygones be 
bygones and leave them alone. The stories we hear 
of people long ago are apt to make us feel that they 
were rather ignorant and very queer, and quite unlike 
ourselves in every way. But I have observed that 
the interest of students is roused when they recognise 
that, in spite of all the differences, the people long 
ago were very like ourselves, and when they begin 
to find links that connect them with ourselves. 

The most obvious link of connection is given by 
places ; each of the Cambridge colleges recalls, once 
a year, the names of the men who, centuries ago, 
provided the buildings and possessions which the 
fellows and scholars of that college enjoy to-day. 
There is a very real link between the present and the 
past in each college ; and I found that many students 
were ready to take an interest in the bygone days of 
the place where they lived themselves, and in the 
doings of the people who used to live there long 
ago. 

It is from this point of view that I wish to speak a 
little about Cambridgeshire ; it is an interesting part 
of the country, because it is closely connected with 
many things of which we read in books. This is 
true, more or less, of every part of England, and makes 
it much more interesting to travel here than in some 
other countries. In new countries you may find a 
great deal that is wonderful and beautiful : the Falls 
of Niagara, and the Golden Gate at San Francisco ; 
but there seem to be many places that have no 
associations with the past ; they may have great 

2 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 

expectations, but they have not the special charm 
which comes from old associations. Cambridgeshire, 
however, is associated with much of what we read : 
with the struggles of S. Edmund and the victory of the 
Danes at Bartlow, with the final efforts of William 
of Normandy to conquer the Isle of Ely. We have 
all heard of Henry VII's great financier, Morton, who 
invented the dilemma known as Morton's Fork ; but 
he becomes more interesting to us when we think of 
him as a man who found time, among all the cares of 
State, to try to improve the harbour at Wisbech, 
and to dig the channel, called Morton's Learn, between 
Peterborough and Wisbech. He was the great engineer 
who first took in hand the draining of the Fen system- 
atically, and Vermiiyden and the Duke of Bedford 
adopted his schemes and followed out his plans. 
Then we can get ample detail about Queen Elizabeth 
and her royal progresses, when we read of her visit 
here and the entertainment she received ; or of 
Charles I as a prisoner at Childerley, or of Cromwell's 
camp on Triplow Heath. There are numberless 
associations with political events in the past which 
give a romantic interest to things and places that are 
familiar, and keep them from being commonplace. 

We may go a little further. However great the 
interest may be of local associations with events of 
which we read, there is still greater interest in trying 
to make out what features tell us themselves. Such 
marked features as the Devil's Dyke at Newmarket 
and the Fleam Dyke at Fulbourn are prehistoric; we 
have no historical records about them, and they have 

3 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

no historical association, but they tell us something 
about themselves, and if we have skill to spell out what 
they mean, we learn a good deal. They are enormous 
earthworks, and they seem to have been made by 
the people in the Eastern Counties to defend them- 
selves against raids from the southern Midlands. 
There is reason to believe that they were made before 
the Romans invaded Britain, and they are works 
which imply a great organisation of labour. If the 
men had only very simple tools, such as the horns of 
animals, to dig in the chalk, and baskets to carry 
the earth from the bottom of the ditch to the top of 
the dyke, the task would take a long time, and this 
seems likely enough ; there must have been the means 
of feeding a multitude of labourers for many months. 
When we begin to think about these great under- 
takings, we see that the monuments which remain 
themselves tell us something about the men who 
made them. 

There is great difficulty in spelling out these 
remains so as to read them aright; there has been 
much hasty guessing at the meaning of archaeological 
remains, which has been discredited by later and 
careful research. There is most danger of going far 
wrong when we have no histories to help us, as is 
the case with prehistoric remains; but when we can 
take historical records and local remains together, 
and fit them in with one another, we find that they 
supplement one another. The historical record 
is sometimes very bald and bare, and yet becomes 
instinct with life when we can supplement it by what 

4 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 

relics and remains tell us about the people who lived 
and worked in bygone times. 

History becomes more interesting the more we 
realise that the men and women of whom we read 
were real people, and very like ourselves ; and we 
get this impression most vividly when we pay atten- 
tion to the evidence of what they did. As long as 
we only think of them as people in a book, and talk 
about them, they seem unreal, like any one else in a 
story-book or a fairy tale, but when we pay attention 
to what they did and what they left behind them, 
we feel that they were not merely in a story-book, 
but that they have a connection with ourselves and 
our own lives. And so it seems to me worth while 
to put the story of the past and the relics of 
the past together; the relics help to clothe the dry 
bones of names and dates, and to make them more 
vivid; and I shall try to call your attention to 
some of the illustrations we find ready to hand in 
Cambridgeshire. 

To give a single instance of what I mean. We all 
know that William the Conqueror won a great victory 
at Hastings, and that, as Harold was killed, there was 
no one to rally the defeated troops or to organise 
general resistance. The country lay before William 
undefended; but he did not find it at all easy to 
establish his royal authority everywhere ; there was 
local resistance here and there, and in no place 
was the resistance more protracted than in the Isle 
of Ely, where Hereward continued to defy the 
Conqueror. William had to make Cambridge the base 

5 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

of his operations against the " last of the English," 
to quote Kingley's phrase ; and he erected a castle. 
There was no stone to be got close by, but he made a 
great mound of earth on the slope of the hill, and on 
the top he put a wooden " block-house," as we 
learned to call them in the South African War, from 
which he could survey the country that lay between 
him and Ely. He had to clear away houses in the 
town 1 to find what he thought a suitable site for 
his castle, and the ground on which it stands came 
directly under the authority of himself and his 
officials; the Castle Hill and the buildings on it are 
still outside the borough, and not under the jurisdiction 
of the Mayor, but of the County. The whole story 
of William's army of occupation and of his efforts 
to establish his authority becomes more vivid to me 
when I go up the Castle Hill, and trace the parts of 
the old town which he cleared away, and look across 
the open country to the great church at Ely, as he 
did from his wooden block-house. 

The view, of course, is very different from what 
he saw : the distant Abbey buildings in his time were 
insignificant; to-day there is a wide stretch of 
cultivated land, whereas in his time very little of the 
land was under cultivation, and there were great 
stretches of marsh and waste. And this leads me to 
another point which I wish to make in this intro- 
ductory lecture. The people in the past were more 
like the people we know than we are ready to think, 
but the things, and the conditions in which they lived, 
1 Domesday Book, I. 

6 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 

were extraordinarily different from those with which 
we are familiar. Much of the soil of the great level 
of the Fens is very rich, but it is liable to be flooded 
by the rivers which come from the Midlands or from 
Suffolk ; and for centuries there has been a struggle 
to keep it free from water; and even now there is 
occasional trouble, if vigilance is relaxed, as was 
recently the case at Suthery. The final efforts at 
controlling these floods were made by a Dutchman 
named Vermiiyden, whose house, with a Dutch 
inscription, can be seen at Fen Drayton ; they are 
well marked in the map of Cambridgeshire by the 
Bedford rivers which carry the water of the Ouse 
from Earith to Denver. But the Fens have a long 
history, before the attempts to free them from flood. 
In Roman times the danger was not from the rivers, 
but from the sea, and the great level of the Fens 
consisted of salt marshes like those on the Essex coast. 
The Romans set themselves to reclaim these marshes 
from the sea by raising a great Vallum, or bank, which 
runs, by Walton and Walsoken and Walpole, from 
Wisbech to Lynn. They were successful in keeping 
out the sea, but their great engineering work had, 
incidentally, another result that they had not fore- 
seen. The channel at Wisbech began to silt up, so 
that the water from the Midlands could not get out 
to the sea, but began to make a new way for itself 
to Lynn, and the flooding of the Fens with river water 
began to be serious. There were local efforts to deal 
with the evil here and there, like the grand banks at 
Over, but even if these were not designed with the 

7 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

deliberate intention of keeping the floods away from 
Over, and turning them on to Swavesey instead, they 
were mere palliatives, and it was not till Bishop 
Morton took the matter in hand that attempts to 
reclaim the drowned lands were systematically made, 
and that men recognised that spasmodic efforts in 
one parish or another were useless. There were 
great differences between what the Fens were in the 
Conqueror's time and what they are in ours. 

The map was entirely different, because the Ouse 
and the Cam did not go into the sea at Lynn ; they 
doubled back at Upware and Cottenham and Earith, 
and flowed into the sea at Wisbech, before the outlet 
there silted up. After the next lecture I shall be 
better able to explain the arguments which have 
convinced me that in the thirteenth century the 
course of the Ouse and Cam was deliberately altered, 
so as to flow past Ely, and to make an improved 
channel for traffic between Huntingdonshire and the 
seaport of Lynn. 

But although the Fens were uncultivated in William 
the Conqueror's time, we must not think of them as 
quite useless and unproductive. Thomas of Ely 
enumerates the rich resources of the Fens, and shows 
that William would have had great difficulty in starv- 
ing out the heroic little garrison there. A Norman 
knight who had lived in the Isle as a prisoner gives 
this account to William of the way in which he fared. 
" I tell you, sire, I have seen wild-fowl alone in that 
island enough to feed them all the year round. I 
was there in the moulting time, and saw them take — 

8 



PREHISTORIC TIMES 

one day one hundred, one two hundred; and once, 
as I am a belted knight, a thousand duck out of one 
single mere. There is a wood there, with herons 
sprawling about the tree-tops — I did not think there 
were so many in the world ; otters and weasels, 
ermines and pole-cats, for fur robes ; and fish for 
Lent and Fridays in every puddle and leat — pike and 
perch, roach and eels, on every old wife's table ; while 
the knights think scorn of anything worse than smelt 
and burbot. . . . The island is half of it a garden — 
richer land, they say, is none in these realms, and I 
believe it : but, besides that, there is a deer-park 
there with a thousand head in it, red and fallow, 
beside hares ; and plenty of swine and goats in woods, 
and sheep, and cattle : and if they fail there are 
plenty more to be got, they know where. . . . Out 
of every little island in their fens, for forty miles on 
end. There are the herds fattening themselves on 
the richest pastures in the land, and no man needing 
to herd them, for they are all safe among dykes and 
meres." x 

The fens no longer abound with the resources which 
were plentiful nine hundred years ago; and we 
have interesting evidence as to the climate, which 
shows us how recent these changes have been. Defoe 
was a shrewd observer, and in making the tour of 
England, he rode along the high road from the Gogs 
to Cambridge. He writes : " As we descended West- 
ward, we saw the Fenn Country on our Right, almost all 
cover'dwith Water, like a Sea, the Michaelmas Rains, 
1 Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, II. 126. 

9 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

having been very great that Year, they had sent clown 
great Floods of Water from the Upland Countries, and 
these Fenns being, as ma}' be very properly said, the 
Sink of no less than thirteen Counties . . . they are 
often thus overflow'd. ... As these Fenns appear 
cover'd with Water, so I observ'd too, that they 
generally at this latter part of the Year appear also 
cover'd with Foggs, so that when the Downs and higher 
Grounds of the adjacent Country were gilded with 
the Beams of the Sun, the Isle of Ely look'd wrapp'd 
up in Blankets, and nothing to be seen but now and 
then, the Lan thorn Cupola of Ely Minster. 

" One could hardly see this from the Hills and 
not pity the many thousands of Families that were 
bound to or confin'd in those Foggs, and had no other 
Breath to draw than what must be mix'd with those 
Vapours, and that Steam which so universally over- 
spread the Country : But notwithstanding this, the 
People, especially those that are used to it, live . . . 
as Healthy as other Folks, except now and then an 
Ague, which they make light of, and there are great 
Numbers of very antient People among them." 1 

The ague appears to be entirely a thing of the past, 
and March, which lies in the very centre of the Fens, 
seems to be very free from fog, and to enjoy its place 
in the sun. 

1 Defoe, Tour (1724), I. 119. Richardson reprints this 
passage as if it was still applicable in 1742. 



TO 



II 

THE IMMIGRANTS 

There were two great waves of immigration which 
swept over the south of Great Britain between the 
Christian Era and the Norman Conquest ; and 
though they differed from each other in every other 
way, they were alike in this, that both of them left 
their mark very deeply upon the face of the country. 

The Romans were bent on systematic colonisation, 
and on bringing this island within the circle of the 
Roman Empire, so that they could draw on its 
resources for supplies of food, and for recruiting their 
armies. The tribes of Jutes and Saxons and Angles, 
and their cousins, the Danes, settled piecemeal, here 
and there, according as they were attracted by one 
district or another and as the fortune of war turned 
them; the Romans introduced a high civilisation 
from Southern lands, while the heathen tribes seemed 
to hold nothing sacred and were ruthless in the 
destruction they wrought. 

The Romans proceeded systematically, both in 
planting the towns and in laying out the fields round 
each centre. Cambridge, on the other side of the river, 
is a very good example of the sort of town they laid 
out. Lincoln and Winchester are very similar; all 
1 Tacitus. 
II 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

three lie on rising ground with a river at the foot, 
just outside the town. All three are oblong ; and 
Cambridge was protected by a ditch and dyke of 
which we see remains in Mount Pleasant and in 
Chesterton Lane. At Lincoln the old Roman gateway 
is still preserved on the north side of the town. From 
each of the sides of the oblong four main roads went 
out, and, as we read, the blocks of land were plotted 
out along these roads in square holdings, 1 so that 
the country must have looked like the chessboard 
country in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. The 
work of the surveyors in laying out the land has been 
obliterated by successive generations who used the 
country according to their own requirements, and 
not as the Roman surveyors had intended, but many 
of the roads remain. In particular, we have the 
Huntingdon Road, which stretches out interminably 
towards the North, and the lines of other Roman 
roads in the county can be easily distinguished. 

We are not rich in Roman remains in Cambridge- 
shire ; but the coins and altars and pottery which 
have been found make it clear that the Romans lived 
and worked here habitually, and moulded the country 
to their model ; but we could not get together a 
great collection of Roman remains, such as there is at 
Colchester or York, or show impressive Roman pieces 
of decoration such as those which remain at Leicester ; 
but the Roman roads tell us about the essential thing 
in the Roman colonisation of this island. The Roman 
Empire was held together, as it were, by the roads ; 
1 Coote, The Romans of Britain. 
12 



THE IMMIGRANTS 

all roads led to Rome, and it was from Rome, as a 
centre, that all the vast area was controlled and 
governed. The roads gave the means of exerting 
military power, and of enforcing law and order. 

There are many of our common things which the 
Romans introduced among us, such as apples, and 
quickset hedges ; and Gregory the Great was not only 
full of missionary enterprise, but was also a great 
farmer, and encouraged the monks who settled here 
to improve the breeds of sheep and cattle. It is most 
impressive to stand at the great wall, which Hadrian 
built to mark the boundary of the Empire on the 
north and to defend it from the hostile tribes who 
had not been subdued; but from that northern 
boundary there were lines of communication which 
brought each part into direct connection with the 
distant centre, and each part was ruled and directed, 
not for its own independent life, but as a part of the 
whole. 

Besides the roads the Romans laid out, there were 
other great public works which they carried through 
and which we are apt to overlook, because, since 
railways have come in, we have lost the sense of the 
importance of waterways for heavy traffic. Even I 
remember the time when the farmers at Horningsea 
sent their corn to market by barges, and Cambridge 
was long dependent on the river for its fuel and coals. 
The Romans developed a great system of water 
communication, which ramified through the county 
and gave extraordinary facilities for traffic ; especially 
if, as seems likely, the Cam had a bigger body of water 

13 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

than to-day and barges could go farther. There are 
four columns in Ickleton Church which are each in 
one piece — a great block of stone : they are Barnack 
stone, and must have been brought from Northampton- 
shire. They very likely were originally meant to be 
the pediment of a Roman temple at Chesterford ; 
but they stand now in Ickleton Church, and they 
must have been conveyed this long distance from the 
quarry. It seems to me most likely that they were 
brought by river, and they may help us to realise how 
much the Romans did for the water communication 
which was of extraordinary importance, all through 
the Middle Ages and till modern times, for heavy 
traffic. The roads were chiefly used for packhorses, 
and not for carts ; and so districts which were served 
by water and had easy access to the sea had great 
advantages for trade. The Romans seem to have 
made a great canal, the Cair Dyke, which linked the 
Fen rivers, the Ouse and the Cam, with the Nene, and 
ran north from Peterborough to Lincoln, so as to 
make an internal waterway between our corn-growing 
region here in Cambridgeshire and the great centres 
of Roman administration at Lincoln and York. 

This very hasty survey of the vestiges of the Roman 
occupation in Cambridgeshire, and the testimony 
they afford of systematic colonisation, may enable us 
to appreciate the extraordinary contrast in the long- 
timed and spasmodic raids of the heathen tribes who 
eventually settled in the country. There is a great 
deal of interesting detail in separating these tribes, 
and noting the distinctions we can trace between 

14 



THE IMMIGRANTS 

them : some of them had the habit of settling in 
villages, as was done in Cambridgeshire, while scattered 
hamlets, or even isolated houses, prevailed where the 
Celtic influence remained dominant. But from the 
time of Hengist and Horsa till the time of Canute, 
these tribes came as raiders, and were heathen, and 
only settled down gradually when they found a 
suitable district which they could wrest from theii 
neighbours. There was nothing systematic about 
the immigration of these settlers, and there are no 
great public works to be ascribed to them. They 
could not continue to burn and plunder indefinitely, 
and when they determined to settle down themselves, 
they did not aim at introducing a civilisation or 
developing the country, but only at living for them- 
selves, and we find a good deal of information in 
Cambridgeshire as to the manner in which those who 
settled here intended to live. 

A map of Cambridgeshire which marks the separate 
parishes gives us the best idea of the groups which 
the original settlers formed, and the land which 
each group occupied. The parish, as an ecclesiastical 
term, is much later than some of the settlements 
which were undoubtedly made by tribes which were 
not Christian, and it seems to have begun with the 
desire to provide places for Christian burial in each 
locality; but the parish is our best representative 
of the original settlements of the English tribes. 

When we look at the parish map of Cambridgeshire 
we are struck by the fact that the new settlers used 
the roads and rivers, which had been thoroughfares 

15 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

for traffic among the Romans, as boundaries. They 
avoided the towns at first, and had little intercourse 
with their neighbours, so that they had no need to 
use the roads as the Romans did. But they found a 
new use for them as well-marked boundaries. They 
were people who greatly depended on their cattle, 
and good boundaries which marked the land of one 
village from another were essential to them, and 
they found these boundaries in the old roads. The 
Huntingdon Road is, for a great part of its course, 
a boundary between the villages which lie on each 
side of it, not a thoroughfare which connects them. 
It marks the line between Dry Drayton and Oaking- 
ton and Long Stanton, between Lolworth and Box- 
worth and Swavesey, and between Conington and 
Dry Drayton. Then the old Roman road is the 
boundary between Cherry Hinton and Trumpington, 
between Fulbourn and Stapleford and Babraham, 
between Balsham and West Wickham on one side, 
and Abingdon, Hildersham, Linton and Horseheath 
on the other. The Ermine Street, from Royston to 
Godmanchester, was another great boundary line, 
which marks the division between Kneesworth and 
Bassingbourn, between Whaddon and Wendy, be- 
tween Arrington and Wimpole, between Long Stowe 
and Bourne. There were older roads, which seem 
to have been important routes before the Romans 
came here and made their roads, such as the Icknield 
Way and the Mere Way, which also served as boun- 
daries for the English settlements. It all makes us 
feel that the first settlers had no use for roads and 

16 



THE IMMIGRANTS 

means of communication, but lived off them 
altogether, and only used them to mark the confines 
of territory beyond which their cattle should not 
stray. 

They turned the Roman waterways, too, to the 
same purpose. Of course, it was important that the 
cattle of each village should have access to water 
from which they could drink, but it is remarkable to 
notice how constantly the brooks and rivulets were 
used as marking the boundaries between settlements. 
I will only remind you how the main stream of the 
Cam separates Waterbeach from the Swaffhams and 
Horningsea, between Trumpington and Grantchester, 
between Great Shelford and Little Shelford and 
Hauxton, and then between Sawston, Pampisford and 
Hinxton on one side, and Whittlesford, Duxford and 
Ickleton on the other. The same sort of thing can 
be seen in regard to the other branches of the Cam and 
the Bourne Brook, but enough has been said to make 
us feel that it was very important to the settlers to 
have well-marked boundaries, so that they might keep 
their cattle from straying, for their main wealth was 
in their cattle. It may be that they were chiefly a 
pastoral people, and that cattle-rearing and milch- 
kine were their chief means of subsistence, a practice 
which remained true of Cottenham and Willingham 
and Soham till comparatively lately ; but, at any 
rate, we shall be right in saying that pasture- 
farming was an essential part of the village economy 
and that the villages had little traffic with their 
neighbours. 

c 17 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

When we try to picture how the people of Cam- 
bridgeshire lived, not at the time when they first 
settled here, but just before the Norman Conquest, 
we find that they had added to their old mode of life 
or changed their habits so much that they were mainly 
given to the tillages, and that the cultivation of the 
soil was the most important of the village resources. 
We learn this from Domesday Book — the extra- 
ordinarily detailed account of the resources of his 
new kingdom which William had compiled as soon as 
he had really established his authority. It gives an 
enumeration of the arable area, and of the labour 
and the available stock in every village, and it is 
especially careful to show how far the land had 
suffered during the disturbances caused by the 
Norman Conquest. It has many retrospective refer- 
ences, and tells us about the normal condition of 
each village and of any special disability which made 
it temporarily poorer. The impression which the 
survey gives, is that of a people who were engaged 
in tillage as their chief means of sustenance. 

There are relics of this primitive tillage, which 
remain here and there, and help to illustrate the mere 
enumerations which are recorded in the Survey. The 
agricultural practice was primitive : the settlers 
laid out the land best suited to tillage, but they 
would have found it extravagant not to use their 
arable fields, when the harvest was over, for grazing : 
they tried to keep as large a head of cattle and 
sheep as they could, so as to manure their fields; 
these were regularly cropped, and the crops were 

18 



THEflMMIGRANTS 

fenced off only by temporary fences which could be 
easily removed. There were, however, permanent 
balks which divided one strip in the fields from 
another, so that the land was permanently allotted ; 
and each man's farm consisted of a number of strips 
which did not lie contiguously, but allowed each man 
to have a share of the good land as well as of the 
poorer soil. The balks which thus separated one 
strip of arable land from another remained untouched 
year by year, and were not ploughed up with the 
rest of the field, and here and there these balks remain 
still. They are very plainly visible on each side of 
the railway between Ashwell and Baldock, just 
outside the county at Cothall ; and also between 
Triplow and Heydon ; they may also be seen at 
Madingley, but they serve no useful purpose now 
and were recently ploughed up at Hildersham. 
But, wherever we come upon them, they are relics of 
the primitive tillage which the settlers in Cambridge- 
shire practised when they took to arable farming. 
The best way of solving the perennial problem of 
agriculture which the experience of the Middle Ages 
attained was that known as the three-field system, 
which gave the best opportunities for working the 
land and for maintaining the stock necessary to carry 
on the co-operative tillage. 

There are other vestiges of the agriculture recorded 
in the Survey which remain in our day. The Domes- 
day Survey enumerates a great number of mills; 
those could not be windmills, for the first known 
English windmill was built on the land of the Abbey 

19 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

of Bury in 1191. 1 They may have been horse-mills, 
and horses would be needed in connection with the 
mills to fetch the corn and carry back the flour, even 
where the horses did not supply the motive power. 
But the mills of which we read in the Domesday Survey 
are mostly along the line of the river or streams, 
and, as a fall of water was needed, they were probably 
at the points where mills are running now. There 
was a mill at Duxford, though it needed repair; there 
were mills at Thetford, Hauxton, Trumpington, Cam- 
bridge, and Quy : it seems probable that the mills 
which we know in the present day are built on the 
sites of the old mills and rely on the same water-power. 
The Survey goes into great detail : the mill at 
Pakenham in Suffolk is described as a winter mill, 2 
because there was not water enough in the stream in 
summer to work it. But, with all the information 
that is given us, we are sometimes left at a loss. There 
was a mill at Balsham, but it could hardly have been 
a water-mill, I think, in that area, and no horses 
are enumerated as being available for it. Perhaps 
some of you who know the parish better than I do 
can solve the difficulty. The limits that are given us 
as to the divided ownership of some of the mills 
(e. g. at Sawston) and as to the manner in which the 
miller was remunerated by a commission, paid in 
kind, on the work actually done, whet the appetite 
for more information on this side of village economy. 

1 Jocelyn's Chronicle (Camden Society). 

2 D.B., II. 361. 



20 



Ill 

SELF-CENTRED GROUPS— MARKETS 

In the last lecture I tried to contrast the Roman 
colonisation with the settlement of the English tribes, 
and to show how much the English held aloof from 
town life, and how little account they took of trade. 
The tradition of Roman civilisation survived through- 
out the country : in one city, Exeter, it seems to have 
maintained itself steadily through all the centuries 
of turmoil ; and in every parish it is a problem as to 
how far Roman influence survived, or how soon it 
was revived. 

To-day I wish to call your attention to the traces 
we find of the beginnings of trade. This was of two 
kinds : there came to be " populous places," which 
needed regular supplies of butter, eggs, and meat, 
and led to the beginning of weekly markets ; and there 
were also the occasional visits of traders from a 
distance, which eventually became organised in fairs. 
It is only about markets I shall speak to-day, that is, 
of trade among neighbours, reserving what I have to 
say about distant trade till next week. 

When I speak of populous places, I do not mean 
such towns as we are familiar with in the present 
day, or even a village, but only a household which 

21 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

was so big, or so fully occupied, that it could not 
supply its own needs week by week, but made a 
regular demand for produce. There were two 
different types of such households. 

In the first place, there were forts or castles, in 
which soldiers were gathered to defend the realm, 
especially against the Danish raids. Warwick was 
built as a castle, containing the troops and munition- 
workers of the day. 

There were, besides, abbeys, where the monks not 
only devoted themselves to maintaining and diffusing 
the Christian faith, but preserved ancient learning, 
and did their best for education and for organising 
industrial arts. Those who were engaged in the 
peaceful pursuit of the arts of life under the shadow 
of a monastery had to be catered for, and thus there 
was a demand for weekly supplies. Bury and Peter- 
borough were abbey towns which have grown into 
great importance. Many of the later abbeys were 
so well organised that they supplied their own needs, 
and never gave rise to a market ; such were the great 
Yorkshire abbeys at Fountains and Rievaulx. 
There were, of course, military centres, like Win- 
chester and Shrewsbury, which have grown into 
large towns, but there is a great interest in the castle 
towns which have never grown up, but remain as 
mere fortresses with a market-place beside them. I 
do not know any of these in Cambridgeshire, but 
Castle Rising in Norfolk and Tattershall Castle in 
Lincolnshire are excellent examples. 

In order to indicate the origin of weekly markets 
22 



SELF-CENTRED GROUPS— MARKETS 

and trade I have distinguished these different ele- 
ments; but there were many towns where both 
these elements were combined, and the towns which 
grew most rapidly were both castle towns and abbey 
towns. After the Norman Conquest there was a 
great era of castle-building, and also of founding 
abbeys ; the castle at Cambridge dates from William 
the Conqueror. Norwich has both a castle and an 
abbey, and both were founded in Norman times, and 
the reason of the origin of the town is a matter for 
conjecture ; our knowledge only enables us to point 
out how some places of trade had their beginning, 
and why some places of trade grew and flourished. 

Medieval towns were formed out of different ele- 
ments, and an account of the way in which these 
elements were welded together in different cases 
involves a series of very long and intricate stories ; 
all that is necessary for my immediate purpose is to 
point out that different forces were at work to bring 
about this result. 

There was, in the first place, the compulsion of 
common authority and jurisdiction, which showed 
itself first in the authority of the owners of the land 
on which the town was built, and, eventually, in the 
responsibility of the citizens to collect taxes them- 
selves and to enforce order themselves; there was 
also an element of coercion. We find traces, too, 
from very early times, of public spirit and desire to 
benefit the town, and this found expression in volun- 
tary associations which provided for mutual help 
and benefits and were known as gilds. 

23 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

The authority of the owners of the land was main- 
tained in a great many cases, such as Manchester 
and Sheffield, till quite recent times (1833), but, as 
exercised in some of the abbey towns, this authority 
was very galling and much resented. At S. Albans 
the abbot insisted on the townsmen having their 
corn ground at the abbey mills and would not allow 
them to have hand-mills; this seems to us mere 
tyranny, but when the abbot had been at the 
expense of building and maintaining a mill, it must 
have been irritating if his tenants refused to make 
use of it. Similar causes of irritation arose in many 
places, notably at Norwich and Reading ; and we 
may notice how many of the abbeys are protected 
from the townsmen by walls : that which is carried 
over the river at Bury is especially picturesque. 
There were very few inland towns which were pro- 
tected by walls, whereas abbey walls are common 
enough, as at Hexham and Shaftesbury. 

There are some words in common use which tell us 
of an old municipal revolution which took place in 
London in the twelfth century, when coercive 
authority in the town passed from the landowners 
to the inhabitants themselves. This change went on 
gradually, in one town after another, as charters 
conferred various privileges on the townsmen, and 
entrusted them with the duty of collecting taxes 
among themselves and the power of enforcing order 
and punishing crime. The rise of this new authority 
and power of civic self-government is often marked 
by the creation of a mayor. The first mention of a 

24 



SELF-CENTRED GROUPS— MARKETS 

mayor of Cambridge is in 1235, and the earliest 
charter that is still preserved and may still be seen 
is that granted by King John in 1207. 

Charters also granted the townsmen the permission 
to be associated together in gilds for mutual benefit. 
We all know how much dispute there has been in 
recent years about the " right to combine " in trades 
unions, and a charter often gave the townsmen a 
right to combine. The bodies which governed the 
town, and which acted from mutual convenience, 
often co-operated and took part in the same work : 
it has been a very frequent thing for the government 
of the town to be carried on in the hall of a gild. 

To return now to market-places. 

The position of the original market-place was 
probably fixed by the convenience of buyers in 
getting supplies, and of sellers in fetching them ; and 
we cannot be surprised that, as the population changed 
its residence, or new roads were made, a change 
of the market-place was found convenient. The 
market-place at Peterborough was changed from the 
east end of the abbey to its present position at the 
west by Abbot Martin, about 1150 ; the town land, 
or empty space, was the original market in Norwich, 
and at Cambridge the market at the time of the 
Conquest was probably held near the present Castle 
Hill, in the pig-market or the hay-market. But 
sometimes we can see that the meeting-place of two 
roads has been a convenient position for the people 
who bought supplies : it was so at Carlisle, where 
there is a large triangular market, and an example 

25 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

of such a market-place has been preserved on the 
borders of our county in the little market-place at 
Fen Stanton. 

There are no public buildings in Cambridge which 
remain to remind us of the life of the town — no old 
gild-hall, no prison ; but there is a gild-hall at Linton, 
where meetings could be held and goods could be 
stored ; and there is evidence of commercial activity 
at Swaffham Bulbeck. 

We have, however, numberless examples of the 
sort of private houses in which the people lived. 
They were of two different types, the yard house 
and the corridor house. Both differed greatly from 
the houses we know in the residential quarters, say, 
of Kensington or of any modern town where the 
house fronts the street, and there is a little street or 
stable lane which gives access to the back-yard. 

The essential feature in the medieval town houses 
was that there was access to the workshop, or yard, 
behind the house from the front. It is a very strange 
thing, but the Romans seem to have used these 
types of houses in some of the cities in this country, 1 
and there is a tendency in the present day to abolish 
basements and revert to it, not only in villas, but in 
such rows of houses as Queen Anne Terrace. The 
yard house was commonly adopted for inns, of which 
there were a great many in Cambridge. The Falcon 
Yard was an admirable example of the old inn which 
had undergone very little alteration twenty years 

1 Haverfield, in the Victoria County History of North- 
amptonshire. 

26 



SELF-CENTRED GROUPS— MARKETS 

ago; and the old arrangements are still recognisable 
in the Lion Yard and the Blue Boar. The yard of 
the Rose has also been preserved for us in Rose 
Crescent. 

The corridor houses had a passage that gave direct 
access to the back of the house, as well as a door to the 
front. We see passage houses all along Sidney Street 
and Trinity Street and all round the market-place. 
They were the common type of town house all over 
England through the Middle Ages, and when English- 
men began to settle in New England they built 
passage houses in the towns they planted there. 
Sometimes the passages were private, as they are 
here ; but sometimes they were public thoroughfares, 
as they are in the rows of Great Yarmouth or the 
closes of Edinburgh. 

At the close of the Middle Ages, in the time of 
Edward VI and Elizabeth, many market-shelters 
were built. The inconvenience of an open market, 
exposed to all sorts of weather, is a matter with which 
we are familiar in Cambridge. We often feel how 
hard it is on those who stand in the market, when 
one Saturday after another is wet ; but what strikes 
us about these shelters, as about some of the oldest 
market-places, is that they were very small. Of 
course the women who came with baskets of butter 
and eggs could be packed very close, as we may see 
them in a French market-place, like that of Le Mans, 
or in the French part of Canada; but it is worth 
while to remember that the area from which supplies 
could be brought was very limited, and that the towns 

27 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

could not extend indefinitely : they were limited by 
the supplies that were available. The old market 
cross at Cambridge has been swept away, though 
there is a picture of it, with a woman selling butter, 
in an edition of Foxe's Martyrs, 1 but there is a market 
shelter still remaining at Mildenhall. 

The small scale on which provision is made is 
impressive, because it reminds us of an important 
fact which we are apt to overlook, namely, that the 
life of the towns in the Middle Ages was limited by 
the conditions of supply. Men could not draw very 
far afield for the food they needed; they could 
not draw very far afield for the materials on which 
they worked; they could not cater for distant 
purchasers. This means that they could not push 
their trade, as is done in modern times. The 
Londoners were anxious as to how it would be 
possible to feed all the people that crowded there, 
and they reckoned on selling English goods at places 
where they had the privilege of trading, and not by 
offering them cheap and by successful competition. 
These limitations affected the policy of the towns : 
each town aimed at making the most of its resources 
for the present and future benefit of the townsmen, 
rather than at growing to a great size. They were 
contented, in modern language, with few transactions 
and big profits on each sale, and thus some of the 
men who could take advantage of these conditions 

1 Edition of 1732. The woman is apparently selling 
yards of butter. Carter mentions butter as made up in yards, 
Cambridgeshire, p. 15. 

28 



SELF-CENTRED GROUPS— MARKETS 

became very rich. We look back on their regula- 
tions, and speak of the narrow spirit of monopoly 
which characterised them ; and it is quite true that 
the towns were self-centred, but the townsmen were 
not specially selfish, as compared with townsmen 
to-day, for we have many monuments which show 
their public spirit and their anxiety to do something 
for the benefit of their own town in time to come. 
Of course the great example, in every village, of this 
public spirit is to be found in the parish church, 
but there are numberless benefactions of other kinds. 
There was the water supply, and conduit, which we 
feel to be distinctive, and for which we are indebted 
to Hobson the carrier; there were many charities 
for the support of those who were past work, like 
S. Eligius' almshouses ; there were isolation hospitals, 
of which we are reminded by the Lepers' Chapel on 
the Newmarket Road, and, especially after the 
Reformation, there were schools, like the Perse 
School and the Green Coat School at Bottisham. 
Enthusiasm for the place where one lived and thrived 
may have been a very narrow sentiment, but it 
expressed itself in real public spirit. 



29 



IV 
FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

Though the English tribes did not take account 
of trade in their first settlements, and only gradually 
engaged in regular trade, it would be a mistake to 
suppose that the tradition of occasional trade at 
fairs, which were frequented by strangers from a 
distance, died out completely. 

The great occasions of festival, with sacrifice and 
feasting, were opportunities for traffic which do not 
seem to have been neglected in heathen times in 
Ireland ; and Gregory was anxious that some oppor- 
tunities of festival should be found for the English 
convert at the newly-consecrated churches. He 
suggested that on the day of the nativity of the holy 
martyrs whose relics were deposited in any church 
the people " might build themselves huts from the 
boughs of trees," * and celebrate the solemnity with 
religious feasting. Five hundred years later we find 
that it was the custom of certain tenants of the 
Abbey of Durham to furnish booths for the feast of 
S. Cuthbert; and one is tempted to think of the 
stalls as distinguishing the trade which was carried 
on at fairs from the sale of produce which went on 

1 Bede, Ecc. Hist., I. xxx. (a.d. 6oi). 
30 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

at the weekly markets to which women came with 
their baskets. 

There is very little mention of fairs before the 
Norman Conquest or in Domesday Book, but we 
hear a great deal of them in the Norman and Angevin 
reigns; and it is quite possible that some of them 
were held at the time of the Conquest, although there 
is no mention of them. But at all events it is clear 
that by far the greater part of the trade of the country, 
and especially of what we should call the foreign 
trade, was carried on at fairs through the Middle 
Ages and down to modern times. Aliens were not 
free to buy or sell in the chartered towns, but they 
could go to the fairs. They sold the products of 
other countries and manufactured goods of many 
sorts; and they expended the money they made in 
purchasing English wool and other raw materials 
for export. 

Fairs, and the concourse of traders which they 
periodically brought about, led, in some cases, to 
the rise of a town. The site of Great Yarmouth 
was a mere sand-bank, but it was convenient for 
traffic, and the herring fair which was held there 
gave rise to the growth of a permanent population. 
There is another instance in our own neighbourhood, 
for it was the fair of S. Ives that led to the building 
of the town there ; and the two fairs which are still 
held in Cambridge may at all events have been 
important elements in the growth of the town as 
a centre of trade. We hear of Midsummer Fair 
in the time of Henry III, and Stourbridge Fair 

3i 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

maintained its importance in the eighteenth century. 
Defoe visited it, and has given a long description in 
his Tour, since he regarded it as the greatest fair in 
Europe, more important even than those at Frankfort 
and Leipzig. 

"It is kept," he writes, "in a large Corn-field, 
near Casterton, extending from the Side of the River 
Cam, towards the Road, for about half a Mile Square. 

" If the Husbandmen who rent the Land, do not 
get their Corn off before a certain Day in August, the 
Fair-Keepers may trample it under foot and spoil it to 
build their Booths, or Tents. . . . On the other Hand, 
to ballance that Severity, if the Fair-Keepers have 
not . . . clear' d the Field by another certain Day in 
September, the Plowmen may come in again, with 
Plow and Cart, and overthrow all . . . into the Dirt ; 
and as for the Filth, Dung, Straw, &c. necessarily left 
by the Fair-Keepers, the Quantity of which is very 
great, it is the Farmers Fees, and makes them full 
amends for the trampling, riding, carting upon, and 
hardening the Ground. 

"It is impossible to describe all the Parts and 
Circumstances of this Fair exactly; the Shops are 
placed in Rows like Streets, whereof one is call'd 
Cheapside ; and here, as in several other Streets, are 
all Sorts of Traders, who sell by Retale, and who 
come principally from London. . . . Goldsmiths, 
Toyshops, Brasiers, Turners, Milleners, Haberdashers, 
Hatters, Mercers, Drapers, Pewterers, China- 
Warehouses, and in a Word all Trades that can 
be named in London ; with Coffee-Houses, Taverns, 
32 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

Brandy-Shops, and Eating-houses innumerable, and 
all in Tents, and Booths, as above. 

" This great Street reaches from the Road, which, 
as I said goes from Cambridge to New Market, turning 
short out of it to the Right towards the River, and 
holds in a Line near half a Mile quite down to the 
River-side : In another Street parallel with the Road 
are like Rows of Booths, but larger, and more 
intermingled with Wholesale Dealers, and one Side, 
passing out of this last Street to the Left Hand, is a 
formal great Square, form'd of the largest Booths . . . 
which they call the Duddcry ; whence the Name is 
deriv'd I could never yet learn. The Area of this 
Square is about 80 to a 100 Yards, where the Dealers 
have room before every Booth to take down, and 
open their Packs, and to bring in Waggons to load 
and unload. 

" This Place is . . . peculiar to the Wholesale 
Dealers in the Woollen Manufacture. Here the Booths, 
or Tents are of a vast Extent, have different Apart- 
ments, and the Quantities of Goods they bring are 
so Great, that the Insides of them look like another 
Blackwell Hall, being as vast Ware-houses pil'd up 
with Goods to the Top. In this Duddery, as I have 
been inform'd, have been sold 100,000 Pounds worth 
of Woollen Manufactures in less than a Week's time ; 
besides the prodigious Trade carry'd on here, by 
Wholesale-men from London, and all Parts of England, 
who transact their Business wholly in their Pocket- 
Books, and meeting their Chapmen from all Parts, 
make up their Accounts, receive Money chiefly in 
D 33 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

Bills, and take Orders : These they say exceed by 
far the Sales of Goods actually brought to the Fair, 
and deliver'd in Kind; it being frequent for the 
London Wholesale-men to carry back Orders from 
their Dealers for 10,000 Pounds worth of Goods a 
Man, and some much more. This especially respects 
those People, who deal in heavy Goods, as Whole- 
sale Grocers, Salters, Brasiers, Iron-Merchants, Wine- 
Merchants, and the like; but does not exclude 
the Dealers in Woollen Manufactures, and especi- 
ally in Mercery Goods of all sorts, the dealers in 
which generally manage their business in this 
manner. 

" Here are Clothiers from Hallifax, Leeds, Wake- 
field and Hulhers field, in Yorkshire, and from Roch- 
dale, Bury, &c, in Lancashire, with vast Quantities 
of Yorkshire Cloths, Kerseyes, Pennistons, Cottons, 
&c, with all sorts of Manchester Ware, Fustians, 
and things made of Cotton Wool; of which the 
Quantity is so great, that they told me there were 
near 1000 Horse-Packs of such Goods from that side 
of the Country, and these took up a side and half 
of the Duddery at least ; also a Part of a Street of 
Booths were taken up with Upholsterers' Ware, such 
as Tickings, Sackings, Kidderminster Stuffs, Blankets, 
Rugs, Quilts, &c. 

" In the Duddery I saw one Ware-house, or Booth 
with six Apartments in it, all belonging to a Dealer 
in Norwich Stuffs only, and who they said had there 
above 20,000 Pounds Value in those Goods, and no 
other. 

34 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

" Western Goods had their Share here also, and 
several Booths were filled as full with Serges, Du-Roys, 
Druggets, Shalloons, Cantaloons, Devonshire Kersies, 
&c, from Exeter, Taunton, Bristol, and other Parts 
West, and some from London also. 

" But all this is still out done, at least in show, 
by two Articles, which are the peculiars of this 
Fair, and do not begin till the other Part of the Fair, 
that is to say for the Woollen Manufacture begins to 
draw to a Close : These are the Wooll, and the 
Hops, as for the Hops, there is scarce any Price fix'd 
for Hops in England, till they know how they sell at 
Slurbridge Fair ; the Quantity that appears in the 
Fair is indeed prodigious, and they, as it were, possess 
a large Part of the Field on which the Fair is kept, 
to themselves; they are brought directly from 
Chelmsford in Essex, from Canterbury and Maidstone 
in Kent, and from Farnham in Surrey, besides what 
are brought from London, the Growth of those and 
other Places." ' 

The volume of trade done at Stourbridge Fair in 
the eighteenth century was still very great ; it was a 
vast concourse, and there is a map which shows its 
extent and the parts of it where different classes of 
goods were sold. We hear, too, from Blomefield that 
the Lepers' Chapel was used as a repository for the 
stuff to build the Fair, 2 and it is spoken of again 
by Carter in 1819, with special reference to the 
extreme discomfort of the crowd of people who 

1 Defoe, Tour (1724) I. 122-125. 

8 Blomefield, Collectanea Cantabrigiensia (1750) p. 171. 

35 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

slept in the booths. 1 But long before that time fairs 
had, generally speaking, declined in importance, and 
business was done regularly in shops where stocks 
were kept all the year round. It was at the time 
of the Crusades that the fairs had their greatest 
importance, as opportunities of trade, relatively to 
the total trade of the country. Bishop Grosseteste of 
Lincoln 2 wrote to the Countess advising her as to 
the different fairs at which it was best worth while 
to replenish the stock of goods of different sorts which 
she needed for her household. 

The Crusades were a great military and missionary 
movement, and the intercourse between the near 
East and the West to which they gave rise, as well 
as between the northern realms and the Mediter- 
ranean, had an extraordinary influence in promoting 
the trade and national progress of many parts of 
Europe. The rise of Venice and Genoa is a mark of 
this side of the Crusades; but it is our business 
to-day to notice the signs which remain of the share 
which Cambridgeshire had in this activity. 

The Knights Templars devoted themselves to the 
missionary and military side of the crusading struggle. 
They were a great international military order; and 
we know that they had great importance in Cam- 
bridgeshire. The Round Church is a monument of 
their enthusiasm for the undertaking which General 
Allenby has accomplished in our day, and for rescuing 

1 Carter, Cambridgeshire, p. 29. 

2 The Rules of S. Robert, printed in Walter of Henley's 
Husbandry (ed. 1890). 

36 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

from domination by the infidel the places which 
seem specially sacred to all Christian men. The 
Round Church is not our only memorial of the 
Military Orders, for the Templars had a preceptory 
at Great Wilbraham, and the Hospitallers at Shingay 
were large proprietors; but nothing remains there 
except foundations, which tell us little or nothing. 

The commercial activity of the time took shape 
in the founding of new towns and the expansion of 
old ones. King Edward I did a great deal in founding 
new towns, both in his possessions in the south of 
France and in his realm at home. He had a keen 
eye for a site which offered facilities for commerce. 
King's Lynn and Kingston-upon-Hull were among 
the cities he created, and he was not very scrupulous 
about respecting the claims of other proprietors, and 
refraining from injurious competition. A similar 
policy had been followed by some great ecclesiastics. 
Bishop Poore of Salisbury moved his church and 
the city, with its inhabitants, from Old Sarum to the 
present site, where the water supply was more ample, 
and Bishop Robert obtained a charter from king 
David to erect a burgh at St. Andrews, and invited 
burgesses from Berwick-upon-Tweed to settle there 
and administer its affairs. 

When there was so much activity in laying out 
new towns or suburbs, we cannot be surprised that 
a great deal of attention was given to town-planning. 
The best examples of this are to be found in some of 
the towns in the south of France, such as Montpazier 
and Carcassonne, but it is at least arguable that the 

37 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

bishops had similar plans in mind, though they 
adapted them to local circumstances, when they laid 
out St. Andrews and Salisbury. The desire to 
imitate these foreign cities is very clearly seen in 
some of the public buildings of the later Middle Ages, 
especially in the town hall of Much Wenlock ; but, as 
I know of no Cambridgeshire instances which still 
survive, I shall not attempt to follow out this line 
of study. 

In the Eastern counties, however, we find great 
alterations of the ground-plan of the town which 
are, at any rate, a local commemoration of this 
great period of commercial development. 

The Roman town of Cambridge had been on the 
north side of the river, on the slope from S. Giles' 
Church to the Huntingdon Road ; and Freeman 
thinks that the resuscitated English town had hardly 
extended beyond those limits. William the Con- 
queror had pulled down a great many houses, how- 
ever, and it seems probable that the inhabitants 
found new homes on the south side of the river along 
Bridge Street. The settlement of Jews, which 
generally was established on the outskirts of the 
town, would lead us to suppose that in the time of 
Henry I the town did not extend southward beyond 
the Divinity Schools and the old site of All Saints' 
Church ; but we fortunately possess a very complete 
account of the town in the time of Edward I, 1 and 
we see that it then covered the area marked by Mill 
Lane, Pembroke Street, Corn Exchange Street, and 
1 Rotuli Hundredorum, I. 
38 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

Hobson Street. There was thus a great extension in 
area, and we see what great facilities were given for 
merchants, in the numerous inns of Petty Cury and 
the market-place. 

The market-place itself is a memento of the 
provision which was made for business ; the men of the 
time were not satisfied to provide for the market 
women who brought weekly supplies, but laid 
out a large market in which stalls could be erected, 
similar to those which were provided at fairs, and 
where the stocks of goods could be displayed. 

The stalls were usually arranged in rows, as we see 
them at present; they were movable, and put up 
only for the market-day; but it came to be con- 
venient to erect more permanent stalls, especially 
for the shambles, or butchers' shops. 

We find evidence in many cities of a great deal of 
encroachment by permanent stalls and houses on 
what had been the open area of the market-place as 
originally laid out. We can trace the original area 
of the market-place in Cambridge by noting the 
corridor houses which surround it. They run along 
Peas Hill and Wheeler Street and Guildhall Place, as 
well as on the east and north sides of the market- 
place itself. The town hall would be likely to stand 
within the square, as it does at present, and the 
shops which are grouped round it must be regarded 
as encroachments on the original open site. The 
still more serious encroachments which are repre- 
sented in coloured engravings of the market-place, 
were destroyed by the great fire in 1849. When you 

39 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

have occasion to visit other towns, and see other old 
market-places, it is quite worth while to try and 
notice how far there has been encroachment on an 
open place. 

The reigns of Edward I and Edward II and the 
first half of Edward Ill's were the great period of 
medieval prosperity. Till this time the country, as 
a whole, had been making material progress, and 
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this 
progress had been generally rapid. There is evidence 
to show that Cambridgeshire shared in this pros- 
perity; for, besides the wealth that was needed to 
provide for immediate wants, there was plenty to 
spare which could be used in beautiful buildings, and 
this has been preserved in our churches. The nuns 
of S. Radegund were able to build their Chapter 
House, and we see its remains in the cloisters of Jesus 
College ; the churches of Little S. Mary's, S. Edward's, 
and S. Michael's parishes were also built at this time. 
All these came to be used partly as college chapels, 
and Hervey of Stanton, whose benefaction has been 
absorbed in Trinity College, was also busied in 
providing S. Michael's Church. There was similar 
activity in several country parishes, at Over and 
Shepreth and Bottisham. But with the middle of 
the fourteenth century this steady progress came 
suddenly to an end. There was a dreadful pestilence, 
called the Black Death, which swept over Europe 
and carried off about half of the population in town 
and country. We have a wonderfully graphic 
account of the circumstances which brought the 

40 



FAIRS AND DISTANT TRADE 

infection in a cargo of Eastern goods to Genoa, and 
we can trace the terrible desolation, and the horror 
it caused, as it gradually spread over Europe. There 
is local evidence that Cambridge suffered as acutely as 
other places. The survivors did not need as many 
parish churches ; S. Giles' was united with All Saints' 
in Castro, and with S. Peter's. Proposals were 
mooted for the union of S. Michael's with S. Mary's 
the Great, or with All Saints' in Jewry, as the present 
parish of All Saints' was then known ; and the burial- 
ground, where the dead were interred, has never been 
built upon ; it still stands as a vacant space opposite 
the County Court, close to the Huntingdon Road. 

These relics of the Black Death help us to remember 
that Cambridge was not spared. We have no statis- 
tics, as chroniclers attempted to give for some other 
towns, but we have contemporary records that show 
the effects of the plague in country places as well as 
in towns. There is an interesting inscription in the 
tower of the church at Ashwell, though it is not easy 
to decipher. 

There is also evidence of the great scarcity of 
labour and the desolation from which there seemed 
to be no hope of recovery. We read a most mournful 
account of Chesterton, but perhaps the most graphic 
and detailed statement comes from Bottisham. 

How much the cost of living had increased is 
shown by the fact that a religious foundation which 
had been made in 1348, proved to be quite inadequate 
in 1351, and the whole had to be re-founded. 

The difficulty of carrying through any great 
4i 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

undertaking may be borne in on our minds by the 
length of time which was required for the completing 
of Great S. Mary's. It was begun in 1478. As Fuller 
says, " all church work is slow, but the mention of 
S. Mary's mindeth me of church work indeed, so long 
was it from the foundation to the finishing thereof." 
The University gave great assistance in collecting 
funds; but, though the old church had been burnt 
down in 1290, it was not till 1478 that the foundations 
were laid, and the new church attempted, and the 
tower was not finished till 1608. You can still see 
in the west porch the inscription to John Warren, 
the master mason, who " with the tower his own life 
finished." 



42 



V 
ROYAL CONTROL 

The Black Death marked the beginning of a long 
period of decadence; and, when recovery began, 
it was largely due to the strong monarchy of the 
Tudor9 and the manner in which they exercised 
control over many localities that had hitherto pur- 
sued an independent, or, at least, a self-centred life 
of their own. I make this statement very con- 
fidently, though I am well aware that it is very 
difficult to get any standard by which to measure 
changes in national prosperity ; indeed, from some 
points of view it might seem that the working-classes 
were particularly well off in the fifteenth century. 

It is also true that the cloth trade was flourishing 
in many parts of England, and was being diffused in 
villages and not confined to corporate towns; there 
was great prosperity among growers of wool, but 
Cambridgeshire had little part in this development. 
For some reason while Suffolk was " full of 
manufacturers," these were never in Cambridgeshire, 
and therefore this exceptional prosperity does not 
concern us. In our county there was a shortage of 
labour, and it was necessary for employers to pay 
very high wages to get any work done; but even 

43 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

this did not benefit the working-classes in the long 
run, for many people changed their habits and did 
not give as much employment as they had done 
before the pestilence, while all other classes suffered 
severely. The Government could not collect the 
taxes which were formerly paid, and many towns 
which had been flourishing continued in a ruinous 
condition for years and years. But it is of a change 
in the habits of the great landed proprietors that I 
especially wish to speak. 

In the prosperous times it had been the habit of 
many proprietors to have their estates cultivated, 
and to move from one estate to another, so as to 
eat up the produce of each estate in turn, rather 
than to collect all the food at one centre ; thus each 
of the great magnates was frequently on the move, 
with his retinue, from one castle to another. These 
castles were very bare, and it seems to have been the 
fashion to take the wall-hangings and such-like 
furnishings from one bare house to another, so that 
there was an enormous retinue of household retainers 
to carry out the removals. The landowners were 
interested in seeing that each estate was well culti- 
vated, so that they should have plentiful supplies on 
each estate. At the zenith of medieval prosperity 
the art of agriculture was carried on effectively. 
Though we do not think of the medieval baron as 
keenly interested in his estate or, as Lord Ernie says, 1 
visiting markets and " fumbling in the recesses of 
his armour for samples of corn," still, the lords of 
1 English Farming. 

44 



ROYAL CONTROL 

Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, were men who interested 
themselves personally in estate management for 
generations. It is remarkable, too, that the Manual 
of estate management which the steward of Christ- 
church at Canterbury wrote at the end of the reign 
of Henry III, continued to hold its own for centuries; 
it had a wide circulation, and there are many copies 
in existence, but there was no fresh experience which 
enabled any one to supersede it till the time of 
Henry VIII. 

But after the Black Death, when there was so 
much difficulty in getting labour, the proprietors 
had no longer any interest, so far as we can see, in 
encouraging cultivation. They could get the best 
income by dispensing with labour as much as possible, 
and using their land for feeding sheep, thus getting 
an income by the sale of wool. In this way they got 
larger returns with less trouble ; and there is ample 
evidence, both in the statute-book and in literature, 
of the turning of arable land into pasturage, but the 
putting down of ploughs and the discontinuance of 
employment were generally looked upon as a social 
evil and a political danger. The policy of the Crown 
was quite clear ; there was a constant endeavour to 
make the landed gentry settle on their estates as 
resident proprietors, and to take an active part in 
enforcing law and order throughout the country. 

The Government had to face many difficulties in 
trying to carry out this scheme, and the struggle 
went on for about a century and a half ; but at last 
the new policy was successful, and under James I 

45 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

and Charles I the temptation to take to sheep- farming 
had ceased to be strongly felt, and the landed gentry 
were more inclined to settle on their estates; men 
who had made money as merchants were also inclined 
to buy property in land and turn it to the best 
account. 

There is a great difference between the houses 
which the magnates had built in the old time of 
prosperity and the houses of the landed gentry in 
Tudor and Stuart times. The magnates had built 
castles, defensible, but very uncomfortable, which 
were large enough to house a retinue. The chief 
feature in the castle was the hall, a huge living-room 
where the retinue ate and slept, and where existence 
must have been very squalid. Even the humbler 
manor houses were laid out on the same principle, 
with a great living-room for the household. The 
country gentry of the Tudor and Stuart times, on 
the other hand, built beautiful houses, which had 
little in the way of defences, and surrounded 
themselves with pictures and treasures. 

In Cambridgeshire we have very little trace of the 
magnates who occupied one house after another in 
turn ; though the de Veres were possibly only tem- 
porary visitors at Castle Camps. The only great 
proprietor who seems to have been much on the 
move was the bishop. He had a castle at Wisbech, 
and a residence at Downham in the Isle, as well as 
at Balsham. 

There is, however, in Pythagoras Hall, a remark- 
able and almost unique example of the thirteenth- 

46 



ROYAL CONTROL 

century manor house, and there are other houses 
which tell of proprietors who ceased to employ their 
tenants in agriculture and preferred to use their land 
for pasture- farming and for game. At Childerley, 
Sir John Cutts got rid of all his tenantry and built 
a beautiful mansion with a garden in front of it, 
and something very similar was done at Landwade ; 
in the Tudor times the royal policy, which Bishop 
Morton helped to carry out, had been very successful, 
and the great households and retinues had been 
broken up. Those who wished to dwell in safety 
could not attempt to keep a retinue of men-at-arms, 
but had to rely on physical features, or strong walls, 
such as we see at Madingley, or more commonly on 
the moats which can be much more easily made in a 
country where there is little building material. The 
moats became common in the fifteenth century, and 
are of great importance in the defences of Tattershall 
Castle; and there are many examples round the 
manor houses and farm buildings in this county and 
in Suffolk. There are doubtless many which I do 
not know, but I have seen moats at Borough Green, 
at Sawston, at East Hatley, and at Croydon ; and 
they must have been effective defences, not so much 
against soldiers, as against riots and disorderly 
neighbours. 

The old country magnates had been men of great 
wealth who were practically independent of the Crown ; 
the new landed gentry were proud of being county 
magistrates, and of exercising the responsibilities 
which the Crown conferred upon them, and the houses 

47 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

which were put up in the seventeenth century and 
onwards, such as Wimpole, or Hatley S. George, 
and Horseheath, Gog-ma-gogs, now pulled down, but 
fully described in Defoe's Tour, were quite without 
defences. 

The recovery of the realm, which began under the 
Tudors, was, in part, the consequence of the great 
increase which took place in royal control. I have 
already pointed out how important the cohesive 
forces had been in regard to the towns, and under 
the Tudors it was a cohesive force which treated the 
realm as a whole, and did not allow local interests 
or class interests to assert themselves. It might have 
come about in some other way, but as a matter of 
fact it was by the exercise of personal authority by 
the monarch and his council that the realm was, 
as it were, pulled together, and made conscious of 
itself as a whole, and of its duty to the king and 
the community. 

It was thus much more possible to devise a national 
policy in regard to the life of the country : in the 
Middle Ages each city determined its own policy, 
but now they were encouraged to co-operate with 
one another. Citizens began to think more of the 
defence of the realm, and not of their own district, 
of the food supply of the realm and the possibilities 
of increasing it, and of the trade of the realm and 
the possibilities of pushing it and opening up further 
progress. So long as each part was self-centred, its 
progress was limited by its resources ; but when the 
resources of the whole realm were taken into account, 

48 



ROYAL CONTROL 

and it was seen that England had plenty of corn to 
export, and plenty of wool to work up as materials, 
there was no longer anxiety about growing too fast. 
The new policy of the Crown was that of pushing 
trade in all directions, and of trying to make sure 
that the trade was so controlled as to react favourably 
on the prosperity of the country as a whole, both in 
peace and war. This policy, which was carefully 
thought out and systematically pursued by Lord 
Burleigh, is generally known as the mercantile 
system, so far as its external aspects are concerned ; 
the aim was that England as a whole should hold 
its own with other nations in Europe. But in an 
inland county like Cambridgeshire we have very 
little to do with the external aspects. Cambridgeshire 
had no part, like Devonshire, in the voyages of 
discovery, nor, like the seamen of the East coast, 
in carrying on the fishing business : it had little 
direct part in the work of colonisation, though Har- 
vard's friends paid him the compliment of calling 
the town where his University was founded after 
the English University of which he had been a 
member. Bunker's Hill may also have borrowed 
its name. 

But we want to look chiefly at the internal life of 
the country. To an extent which never occurred 
before it was treated as a whole, and there were regu- 
lations of all sorts, not by local authority, but by 
royal proclamations or parliamentary enactments, 
and there was a possibility of much more division 
of labour, and of each part of the country specialising 
e 49 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

in what it could do best. The increase of royal 
regulation and control went on from the Tudor times 
till the Civil War, and the specialisation of Cambridge- 
shire in agriculture and the improvement of agri- 
culture went on all through the eighteenth century ; 
we can still point to some monuments of both 
tendencies. 

We have had some experience lately of attempts 
to organise the resources of the realm in a great 
emergency, and to direct skill and labour to carrying 
on a war for the defence of the realm as a whole. 
In Elizabethan England an effort was made to 
organise the realm as a regular thing, so as to foster 
the future prosperity of the whole, and make each 
part contribute to the common good. There was an 
elaborate machinery for fixing the rates of wages, 
and for securing a sufficient supply of agricultural 
labour. 

There was also a very elaborate machinery for 
regulating the market and for seeing that the food 
supply was used so as to last all the year round, 
and that it was, as far as possible, rendered available 
for all districts. Officials, called clerks of the market, 
were charged with this delicate duty; they had 
originally been concerned as purveyors in getting 
supplies for the royal household, but in Tudor times 
they came to have a supervision over transactions in 
all sorts of goods. The special arrangements which 
were made for the poor in years of scarcity, by selling 
them corn at a reduced price, paved the way for the 
introduction of a system of Poor Relief. The magis- 

50 



ROYAL CONTROL 

trates and clerks of the market had to apply the 
general instructions of the royal council, and to see 
that the interest of the consumer, who wished to 
have corn cheap, and the encouragement of the 
producer, so that he might go on cultivating, were 
both taken into account. It is noticeable that in 
England, as compared with most continental countries, 
there was a tendency to encourage the producers of 
corn to furnish a large supply and maintain the 
profit of the plough. We are reminded of the minute 
care of a paternal government at this time by the 
bells which were provided to manage the conduct 
of business in a well-ordered market. 1 The medieval 
towns did not have bells of their own which could 
summon the citizens suddenly ; they were often 
content to bargain for the use of the church bells, 
as was done here and in Ipswich. 2 But after 
Elizabeth's time market bells became common, and 
bell turrets are noticeable in many towns, like S. Ives, 
where markets were held. The regulations with 
regard to fire hooks are another instance of the 
minuteness of royal supervision. 

One result of this general system of regulation 
was that each district was better able to devote 
itself to the activities for which it was most fitted. 
This comes out in the history of towns, but it 
is also clear in the counties. Some places were 

1 On the ist of March [1566] the Vice-Chancellor decreed 
that the Taxors' servants should, every Saturday after one 
o'clock, take care that the Market Bell be rung (Cooper's 
Annals, v. 299). 

2 Wodderspoon, Memorials of Ipswich. 

51 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

encouraged to devote themselves to the fishing trades ; 
as new land was brought into cultivation, some of 
the light soils began to be used for the sheep-farming 
for which they were adapted, but Cambridgeshire, 
on the whole, was devoted to tillage and cattle- 
rearing. 

These were prosecuted with vigour. The increased 
facilities for marketing corn gave farmers the 
opportunity to alter their practice. Many of them 
had been accustomed to grow corn for their own 
subsistence and live on the produce of their land, 
and it was a great change when they took to farming 
for the market, and selling the produce they secured. 
Farming became a trade, like other trades, in which 
the energetic man could make money; it was not 
merely an occupation by which a certain number of 
people lived. There was an extraordinary impulse 
to agriculture when this new aim to push the busi- 
ness and increase the production began to be generally 
operative. 

Great pains were taken during this period to extend 
the area which was cultivated ; marshes were re- 
claimed from the sea, and here in Cambridgeshire 
great schemes were undertaken for saving the country 
from inundations and flooding by the rivers. The 
improvement of traffic and prevention of flood were 
the two objects which Bishop Morton seems to have 
had in mind, and the Bedford rivers are constant 
reminders of the success which at length attended 
the scheme and turned the Isle of Ely from being 
wild country into a great stretch of rich arable land. 

52 



ROYAL CONTROL 

There was also a change of agricultural method 
which was of first-rate importance : this was the 
introduction of convertible husbandry, by which the 
fields, instead of being permanently used for tillage 
or as commons for feeding cattle, were alternately 
used for grazing and for growing corn. This was an 
immense improvement on the old three-field system. 
For some reason it had been very generally adopted 
in other counties before it was taken up in Cambridge- 
shire ; it did not become general here till the end of 
the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth 
centuries. This agricultural revolution is very diffi- 
cult to follow, as it went on for centuries in different 
counties, and a further difficulty arises from the fact 
that it has been commonly spoken of as " enclosing," 
and confused with the movement for increased sheep- 
farming, from which it was quite distinct. In 
Cambridgeshire, partly because it was so late, we 
have extraordinarily careful discussions of the good 
and evil of the change by very competent men at the 
time it occurred. There were two directions in which 
a great saving was effected by the new system : it 
was far better to feed the cattle in separate closes, 
where they could be properly attended to, than to 
let them wander together on the common waste, 
where there was more risk of infection. The land 
of the common waste was not made the most of 
when it was not improved, either for tillage or pasture, 
but left in its primitive condition. It was also of 
great importance to be set free from the tyranny 
of routine, and forced to follow the same custom 

53 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

as other neighbours, instead of being free to do the 
best one could for the land. The advocates of the 
new system of convertible husbandry were certainly 
over-sanguine about the results to be expected, 1 
and they pushed on the change in some places in 
a ruthless manner which showed that they were 
heedless of their poor neighbours. But it can hardly 
be doubted that the change was a real improvement 
in the country as a whole, and the advantages at 
length approved themselves in Cambridgeshire, as 
they had done in other parts of the country. It is 
also true that the old-fashioned system, when care- 
fully attended to, held its own in certain parishes. 
The great herd of milch-kine fed together on the fen 
at Cottenham, and the owners of common rights 
appointed order- makers 2 who administered affairs 
so that they were able to make good account of the 
common use of the common waste. 

1 Fitzherbert, Surveyinge. 

2 Camden Miscellany, XII. 



54 



VI 
FOOTPRINTS 

In this last lecture I hope to give you a short 
summary of the main points to which I have directed 
your attention throughout the course. I have been 
directing your attention to what are, in Longfellow's 
phrase, " footprints in the sands of time." We 
may, perhaps, change the figure and think of the 
church in every parish as a monument which has 
stood for many ages, and note how different genera- 
tions have left their marks upon it. 

There is something in the cathedral of Ely to 
remind us of each generation for centuries. There 
is the great Norman nave, built of stone which came 
across the seas from Caen. It was begun about 
1083 and finished in 1130, just about the time of 
Domesday Book, and the Galilee about the time of 
Magna Carta. The extreme east end of the choir, 
with its pointed windows, dates from the time of 
Henry III, and was built by Hugh of Northwold, 
Bishop of Ely 1229-1254. Then the disaster which 
had long threatened the monks overtook the church : 
the great central tower fell on February 22, 1322, and 
broke down the three western bays of the choir in its 
ruin. But the sacrist, Alan of Walsingham, who was 

55 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

a great architectural genius, set about repairing the 
disaster at once, and finished the Lantern, which is the 
characteristic feature of Ely cathedral, in 1342. Thi 3 
feature seems to have given rise to conscious imita- 
tion in the towers of the parish churches at Sutton 
and Cheveley. 

The restoration of the ruined portion of the choir 
was begun in 1332 by Bishop Hotham, who left 
money for carrying on the work ; and in spite of the 
labour difficulties which the Black Death caused, 
it was completed in 1361. It serves as an excellent 
example of the beautiful decorative work which was 
characteristic of the early period of Edward III. 
There are also chapels and windows of the fifteenth 
century, which give opportunity for a greater display 
of glass than was provided for in earlier times ; and 
so we have in this one building outward and visible 
marks of every stage of the building art from the 
Conquest to the Reformation. 

The work of church-building went on not only in 
the cathedral church, but in every parish as well. 
Very often one age has wished to build something 
new-fashioned, and has destroyed the work of previous 
generations. In the fifteenth century, when the rich 
clothiers had much money at their disposal, the love 
of colour was more fashionable than it had been before, 
and the men of the time were particularly ruthless 
in knocking large windows into the old walls; they 
were fond, too, of adding towers which could carry 
a peal of bells. But there are a great many parish 
churches in which we can readily detect these later 

56 



FOOTPRINTS 

alterations and form some idea of the original struc- 
ture. We have no wooden churches, such as were 
commonly built in the times before the Conquest ; 
but S. Bene't's, at Cambridge, which had been a 
wooden church, was burned by the Danes in a.d. ioio, 
and the tower, which was built of stone after that 
event, has the " long and short work " which was a 
sort of attempt to reproduce in stone the appearance 
of a timbered building. Without making invidious 
selections, we can see how many periods of archi- 
tecture are represented in the parishes just round 
Cambridge : there is a characteristic Norman church 
at Coton ; an curly English church at Cherry Ilinton ; 
I decorated churches at Trumpington and Fulbourne, 
1 and a perpendicular church at Great Shelf ord. 

In many cases a mere fragment remains to testify 
to the original character of a stone which has been 
repaired or rebuilt out of all knowledge. A great 
many churches have some fragment of Norman work 
which shows what a wonderful time of architectural 
activity there was in the reigns after the Conquest; 
thus, for example, we can pick out the original chancel 
arch of Picot's church in S. Giles', Cambridge. 

It is often interesting to trace the ground plan of 
a church and see how it has been added to, bit by 
bit. The normal course of change in this respect 
has been worked out in Wakefield Church by the 
late Mr. Micklethwaite. It is not hard to find in almost 
every parish church object-lessons which give children 
a sense of connection with some period in the past. 
I remember spending one hour between trains in 

57 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

looking at a church in Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and 
being delighted to find that a mistress had taken a 
class of children there to illustrate something that 
came into their lesson from the parish church. 

This is not only possible in regard to the fabric of 
the church, but also in regard to the decorations and 
furniture of the church. The woodwork at King's 
College Chapel, with the true lovers' knot in which 
the initials of Henricus Rex and Anna Regina are 
intertwined, tells us of the brief period when this 
description was possible, and the beautiful screen 
and rood-loft at Guilden Morden, and another, as 
well as stalls, at Balsham, illustrate the munificence 
of the gilds, who were associated with the parish 
clergy in serving the church. Cambridgeshire is not 
so rich in beautiful screens as some other counties, 
such as Norfolk or Devonshire, and the account which 
William Dowsing gives of his deliberate work of 
destruction is painful reading. He was a conscien- 
tious man, with a misplaced sense of duty, and he did 
his work very thoroughly. There has also been a 
very general loss of the mural paintings, of which 
mere traces can be seen in many churches, but this 
may have been due to such influences as climate, 
rather than to deliberate destruction. The most 
striking picture that remains is the S. Christopher at 
Imping ton. 

There are, however, many personal memorials 
which help to record the history of the county; 
such as the brasses which commemorate the knights 
and great magnates of the thirteenth century at 

58 



FOOTPRINTS 

Trumpington, and at Westley Waterless, and two 
magnificent brasses in the chancel at Balsham. 

Only a few fragments of ancient glass have been 
left for the most part; but there is a wonderfully 
interesting heraldic window at Wimpole, which gives 
the family tree of William de Ufford, 2nd Earl 
of Suffolk, who heard of the revolt of the men of 
Norfolk, and went disguised as a squire to warn 
Richard II of that dangerous rising. 

There are numerous monuments which tell of the 
families which settled as residents in the county. 
Many of these have since left. There were the Cottons 
at Landwade x and Madingley, of whom the most 
distinguished member built the house at Hatley S. 
George; the Darrells at Shudy Camps; the Hard- 
wicks at Wimpole ; the Manners at Cheveley ; and 
the Stewarts at Teversham. 2 

There is also a good deal of church plate that is 
not only of interest, but of value. During the 
Reformation period there had been a very general 
looting of church plate by the extremists in the 
Government. They made an exception in 1552 by 
directing the Commissioners to leave in each parish 
one " cup " for the communion of the laity. 3 It was 
not till 1567 that systematic attempts were made to 
replace the mischief done by these ravages. Careful 
inquiries were made by Archbishop Parker, and the 

1 Thomas Cotton was Sheriff of Cambridgeshire in 1287, ^\ 
Carter, Cambridgeshire , p. 230. 

2 Blomefield, p. 185. 

3 Bloxham, Principles of Gothic Architecture (1882), III, 184. 

59 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

churchwardens were induced to provide a number of 
" cups," which were made by Fish of Norwich, and 
apparently cost £$ apiece, 1 so that by this exercise 
of ecclesiastical authority, chalices, with the name 
of the parish upon them, were provided in a very 
large number of parishes in the archdeaconry. 

They are seen to be more common in Cambridge- 
shire than in other counties, and we may feel in such 
a case as this that they were probably due to the 
special efforts of Bishop Coxe or some other ecclesi- 
astic, and did not come haphazard. The special 
characteristics of a county may perhaps be ultimately 
traced in large measure to the tastes and aims of the 
people in the county. 

The presence of the University and the Colleges 
was doubtless a great influence in the history of 
Cambridgeshire. I am inclined to suspect that the 
position held by the University as Clerk of the Market 2 
or the Act which required College rents to be paid 
in corn, and not in money, may have had some 
influence in delaying the agricultural revolution in 
Cambridgeshire. It is possible, however, that this 
is accounted for on purely agricultural grounds : 
here and there in Cambridgeshire there were excellent 
arrangements for carrying on the use of the common 
waste to good purpose, and there may have been 
no general desire to get rid of the wastes and 
substitute separate closes for pasturing the cattle. 

1 Churchwardens' Accounts, Great St. Mary's. 

2 The University powers as Clerk of the Market were a 
great grievance (Cooper, Annals, v. 47, 57, 187). 

60 



FOOTPRINTS 

There certainly were resident gentry who took an 
active part in the work of agricultural improvement : 
Sir Roger Jenyns of Bottisham, who was much inter- 
ested in the welfare of the parish and founded Bottis- 
ham School, 1 and the experiments in irrigation which 
were made at Babraham by Pallavicino 2 showed that 
the present Lord Lieutenant was not the first of the 
landowners there to realise the importance of doing 
his best for agriculture. Vancouver and Gooch, in 
their Reports on the Agriculture of Cambridge, call 
attention to the intelligent interest taken by the 
representative of the Bendyshes at Barrington, by Mr. 
Hurrel at Foxton, and by Mr. Hicks at Wilbraham. 

Similar influences were doubtless at work in secur- 
ing for Cambridgeshire a share in the great improve- 
ment of facilities for traffic by wheeled vehicles which 
occurred in the eighteenth century. Cambridge had 
been well provided with primitive roads and Roman 
roads, and local roads had gradually acquired import- 
ance in the Middle Ages; but the draining of the 
fens rendered it possible to revert to a disused line of 
traffic, and an Act of Parliament was procured in 
the eighteenth century for making the direct road 
from Cambridge to Ely by Streatham, instead of 
continuing to go round by Aid. Steps to improve 
the town as regards traffic were also taken in 1788. 3 

The history of Cambridgeshire opens up a vista 

1 E. Hailstone, History of Bottisham (Camb. Antiq. Soc), 
p. 42. 

2 Arthur Young, Annals, v. 16, p. 177, quoted by Gooch, 
Agriculture of Cambridgeshire, 181 1, p. 258. 

3 28 George III. c. 64. 

6l 



THE STORY OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE 

of indefinite extent, if we start from familiar objects, 
and ask the right questions about them and try to 
find the answers; and we shall find that this humble 
method of inquiry about familiar things enables us 
to extend our knowledge of other parts of England. 
Probably few of us are native, of Cambridgeshire; 
we all have associations and interests with some other 
county as well. I was brought up in Dumfriesshire, 
and through the Earls of Huntingdon there are 
curious links of connection between that distant 
border county and the fen country. But we shall 
make most speed if we are content to compare our 
own county with some of its neighbours : the contrasts 
as well as the resemblances between Cambridge and 
Suffolk are very interesting. Cambridgeshire, like 
Suffolk, had a paucity of good building-stone : but 
Cambridgeshire was enabled by its waterways to 
fetch Northamptonshire stone from a distance, while 
Suffolk made the most of the flints which were 
available within its own borders. Cambridgeshire 
had a great abbey at Ely, as Suffolk had at Bury, 
and the history of these great rivals and of their 
influence on their neighbours gives us a vivid picture 
of what abbeys were, and of the parts they took in 
the life of England. But there are contrasts too ; 
the histories of the two counties supplement one 
another. Cambridgeshire was cut off from the sea, 
while Suffolk had an important port at Ipswich, and 
is full of monuments which remind us of its overseas 
trade. Cambridgeshire was purely agricultural, and 
a centre of internal trade, while Suffolk was full of 

62 



FOOTPRINTS 

manufactures; the fifteenth century, which was one 
of decadence in Cambridgeshire, was the time of 
the prosperity of the Suffolk clothiers. The migra- 
tion of manufactures to Yorkshire and the west of 
England caused terrible unemployment in Suffolk, 
with which the magistrates tried to deal by intro- 
ducing new industries, but this difficulty could not 
have been felt in Cambridgeshire at all. The strangers 
who came to Kersey, and other villages in Suffolk, 
were probably attracted by the facilities for getting 
wool to weave ; the strangers who came to Cambridge- 
shire were brought to dig and drain, as they did at 
Thorney. There is a parallelism, but there is plenty 
of contrast between counties that are close neigh- 
bours, and when we institute comparisons with other 
parts of England we find that Cambridgeshire had 
little need for defence, while Cheshire and Shropshire, 
like Northumberland and Cumberland, were border 
counties, where the differences of two races, or the 
rivalries of two realms, long continued to be causes 
of disturbance. 

But I venture to plead that by studying the traces 
which remain of its own history in each county we 
have the best prospect of rendering the history of 
England vivid and real to ourselves, and to those 
whom we teach. 



63 



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